The Tampa refugees: John Howard was right

To give in to supposedly "humanitarian" demands to grant residence to people that present themselves at the border (or present themselves once inside it, or are caught having lived here illegally) is therefore to take a remarkably blinkered approach. It is a short-sighted perspective on asylum: in effect it is to choose to take in those strong enough to come to the door, rather than those that need help most.

In attempting to enter a country this way, illegal immigrants promulgate a vast system of criminality, a web through which drugs, weapons, adult and child prostitution and slavery run too.

To allow illegal immigrants to exploit the system by simply "turning up" (or blackmailing countries into allowing them in, by taking their young children aboard unseaworthy vessels and necessitating their rescue) would be a slap in the face to legal immigrants who wait their turn for visas. It would anger the very poorest in society who see resources allocated to newcomers. The resentment that would naturally follow would make the lot of the legitimate refugee, re-homed in Australia through the proper channels because genuine persecution was faced, much more difficult.

Many legitimate refugees resent bogus asylum seekers such as those on the Tampa: This is true of many of the 14,000 former-refugee-and-now-resident Afghans in Australia at the time of the Tampa crisis, a group of legitimate refugees whose acceptance demonstrated that Australia’s stance against illegal immigration was hardly racist.

As one such Afghan-Australian said at the time to a rather surprised BBC correspondent, who’d gone hunting for a source sympathetic to the illegal immigrants:

They're queue jumpers and economic migrants! It's unfair! We know families who've been waiting 10 years to come here. People are eating grass in Afghanistan. How can any Afghan afford to pay all that money to people smugglers to get here?

To oppose illegal immigration is not racist - it is sensible. Proper support of legitimate asylum and refugee schemes would make that point, and be laudable. Australia should contribute more, perhaps much more, to the United Nations scheme for refugees. Countries contiguous with the relevant nation ought to be supported to a greater extent with funds and trained aid workers when the refugees begin to arrive. Australia should accept more genuine refugees under the auspices of the central UN scheme, the UN having ascertained that their claims are genuine. But not one single "asylum seeker" at the gate should be allowed in.